Generally, in traditional cellular communications systems, base stations (BSs) are introduced to the communications system in an organized manner: usually to increase coverage in a rural area or system capacity in an urban area. Typically, when a new BS is introduced to the communications system, the topology of the communications system is changed. This may cause a potential problem for system operators. For example, in second generation (2G) technologies like GSM, system engineers may need to manually reassign frequency reuse patterns for the new network topology.
An advantage of CDMA and other universal frequency reuse communications systems is that there is no need to redesign the frequency reuse pattern. Nevertheless, a transmit power setting of the new BS and of the surrounding BSs may have to be set and/or reset manually. A classical rule for setting transmit power is to set the transmit power of BSs so that at a cell boundary, the received transmit power from neighboring BSs are approximately equal. Additionally, the received transmit power should be more, but not too much more than a background noise level. In general, if the transmit power of a BS is too high, then a signal plus interference to noise ratio (SINR) of a user located at a cell boundary may be interference limited and the excessive transmit power is wasted, while if the transmit power is too low, the coverage of the BS is not very good. Additionally, there may be motivation for a cell boundary between two BSs to be approximately in between the two BSs since this may allow for equally large cells and may lead to a robust and scalable network topology.